


brother, if I could sing

by queenbaskerville



Series: you wonder where this fellow went [1]
Category: Chuck (TV), White Collar
Genre: Angst, Canonical Character Death, Gen, Neal Caffrey & Bryce Larkin Are Twins, One Shot, Secret Identity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-13
Updated: 2020-07-13
Packaged: 2021-03-04 17:55:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,278
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25240501
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/queenbaskerville/pseuds/queenbaskerville
Summary: Bryce Larkin is an only child.
Relationships: Chuck Bartowski/Bryce Larkin, Peter Burke & Neal Caffrey
Series: you wonder where this fellow went [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1835608
Comments: 13
Kudos: 67





	brother, if I could sing

**Author's Note:**

> bryce & neal as twins has been done before, but I spent some time jotting this down anyway
> 
> my alternate backstory for neal has him meeting mozzie while he’s still a teenager, and assumes they have at least a year or two running cons together and establishing trust&friendship before trying to hit adler (additional timeline detail in end notes)
> 
> title from [“rain song” by the mountain goats](https://genius.com/The-mountain-goats-rain-song-lyrics)

It’s a little while after Fleming recruits him that one of the men with too many false names approaches Bryce with a file. He doesn’t say anything. These sorts of men often don’t have to.

A test, Bryce knows, even before he opens the file.

The first few documents and reports contain information that Bryce isn’t really surprised about. The day after his sixteenth birthday, his parents sat him down and told him that he was adopted. Somewhere between his world being turned on its side, a brand new fear of disownment rearing its head, and the general moodiness that came with being sixteen, one of the expensive living room lamps was (accidentally) shattered, and his parents—good people, but not usually emotionally transparent—had pulled him into their arms and told him that they loved him and that he was theirs. Told him a few times, and didn’t let him go until he got it. They went over the rest of it the next day when all three of them had calmed down. A closed adoption, but the Larkin family was rich enough that, when Bryce turned eighteen, money in the right hands could get answers, if Bryce wanted. Eighteen specifically because his parents wanted him to think about it. _Don’t disavow them now, whoever they are_ , his father had said—the _them_ being his biological parents— _but don’t feel like you have to go looking for them, either._

 _Just think about it,_ his mother had said. _No rash decisions. Take some time. You’re_ ours. _Just remember that._

 _Ours_ in that tone meant _family_ just as much as it meant _possession_. It calmed Bryce’s fears of abandonment just as it made his shirt collar itch in that way it did when he felt like there was no exit from a perfect picture frame. He loved his parents. His parents loved him. It didn’t mean that sometimes he didn’t get bored.

At eighteen, Bryce had his pick of Ivy Leagues and parents who wanted him and money and an interest in doing something just a little unexpected, something that would throw a wrench in every well-made plan, even if he couldn’t figure out what that was yet. He knew, however, that he wasn’t interested in looking back. Forward was the only way—bigger and better and newer things. Not the past. The closed adoption stayed closed.

Now, Bryce had a file, and as he paged through it, his own face grinned back at him.

Well, no. Not his own face. It takes him a second, but he realizes—this is a photocopy of a yearbook photo from when Bryce would’ve been in seventh grade, but Bryce had braces until eighth grade, and this kid’s grin lacked all that metal. Not to mention, the private middle school Bryce had attended required uniforms, blazer and all. The boy grinning up at him is in a blue t-shirt. The clothes should’ve given it away first, Bryce knows, but something about the smile had drawn his eye.

Bryce feels his stomach drop as he skims the rest of the file. His biological mother’s name. Identical twins split up. The closed adoption for George Brooks, who became Bryce Larkin. Foster care for Danny Brooks—foster home after foster home, too many, and then a missing persons report at fourteen, note of a probable runaway.

Bryce takes a moment to wonder if his parents had known he was a twin and just declined to adopt his brother. He imagines himself and a duplicate in matching private school uniforms, his parents behind them both, posing for a family portrait, or he and his duplicates in their uniforms singing some sort of duet for a chorus performance, his parents rapt in the audience, or his parents showing them off to family friends, and decides that his parents must not have known. They’d have jumped at the chance to adopt identical twin boys. Bryce would’ve worn matching outfits until he was old enough to pick his own. They’d have had matching cribs, even.

Bryce shakes off the vague and imagined alternative childhood and returns to the more urgent reality. The CIA wouldn’t be giving him this test over a missing brother. Inform him, sure, since it could be a weakness someone could exploit if he found out another way. But testing him like this—silently handing him this file—there’s something else. Of course there is.

It comes in the form of information the CIA tracked down and pieced together but didn’t pass along to anyone else. The missing persons report still says missing; the case isn’t under active investigation and hasn’t been for years, but Danny Brooks has never been connected with the guy in the security camera picture, his face half a blur. There are a few aliases listed in the file. No note of what Danny was doing between disappearing and this picture of him in his young adulthood, but the aliases are concerning enough.

An identical twin brother is problem enough for a CIA agent. An identical twin brother who seems like he’s on the road to get mixed up in all sorts of trouble, legally speaking?

Bryce flips back to the yearbook photo. He feels like he’s going to be sick. What was he doing at fourteen? Horseback riding camp. Private school. Expensive vacations. Bryce Larkin wasn’t the kind of kid who could go missing at fourteen and nobody really care too much to look for him. Danny Brooks—Bryce’s _brother_ —apparently was. Now, it seems like the only person in this world with any sort of power who gives a damn that he’s alive is Bryce. If the CIA is looking to do a preemptive cleanup job, some kind of hit, sweep Danny under the rug so the only person walking around with Bryce’s face is Bryce—

“He can’t be connected to me,” Bryce says.

His mind races. He keeps his expression neutral when he looks up and makes eye contact, even though he knows the silent man in front of him probably gleaned everything he wanted to know from Bryce’s body language while Bryce read the file. That’s fine. That’s to be expected. A surprise identical twin brother would get a reaction out of anybody, even a CIA spy-in-training.

“Danny Brooks doesn’t exist,” Bryce says. “This guy, whoever he is, whatever he gets up to, he’s somebody else.”

Burn Danny Brooks, but _just_ Danny Brooks, Bryce is trying to say. He prays he didn’t just put a kill order out on his twin, whatever name he’s going by now, and waits for the man to respond.

The man nods and takes the file back. Bryce lets it go with apparent ease, and he tries not to want it back, tries not to spare a thought towards regretting not reading it more thoroughly, committing more of it to memory.

“Anyone could mistake him for you,” the man says.

“They won’t have the occasion to,” Bryce says, hoping that that’s true. It has to be good enough. There are no other options. “The resemblance is uncanny, I’ll admit,” Bryce says, “but—”

“But,” the man says.

“Bryce Larkin is an only child,” Bryce says.

It shouldn’t weigh so heavy on his tongue to say that. It’s not as if he’s even had a brother for much longer than fifteen, maybe twenty minutes. This is keeping his brother safe, he reminds himself. The CIA won’t kill him, and, most likely, neither will any enemies Bryce happens to make in the future. It’s not like the connection between them is at all easy to make. They’ve never met, they’re not legally connected, they grew up in different states, and his brother has been living off the grid for a long time. If even the CIA probably didn’t even have their relation on file until after they’d recruited Bryce, nobody else is going to figure it out, especially not after they burn Danny Brooks. And the CIA didn’t know before—Bryce grows surer of that with every second—because if they had, they wouldn’t have recruited Bryce, or—or recruited them both, Bryce realizes. His world shifts on his axis. Is that what the man had wanted him to do? Suggest recruitment?

It hadn’t crossed his mind. Not for a second. Bryce has never met his brother, has no idea what he’s like. Whether or not he’d be well-suited for this—whether or not he’d even want to do it—and what if he said no? Would a hit on him be the only option? Bryce is glad he hadn’t suggested recruitment. He didn’t want to be put in that spot if his brother made a choice the CIA didn’t like. Better not to give him a choice at all.

Really, Bryce thinks, as the man walks away with the file, which Bryce is certain is going to be destroyed, this is the best outcome. This is what’s best, what’s safest. There’s no time for regrets—no _If I’d looked into my adoption at eighteen,_ no _If my parents had done it for me before then,_ no _If I’d gotten the chance to track him down and meet him,_ no _If I’d been able to get to know my brother_ —none of that. Bryce Larkin doesn’t have a brother.

Danny Brooks’s birth certificate, social security number, school records, foster care records, even his missing persons report, it’s all going away. George Brooks, too, will probably vanish; Bryce doesn’t know how they’ll make that happen and he doesn’t really care. He was never George. He’s always been Bryce.

When Bryce gets back to Stanford that evening, because he still has the luxury of things like class and normalcy and friends (still has the luxury of having no idea these are things he can lose), he works on Zork with Chuck.

This turns out to be a bad idea, because Chuck chooses this evening to display an abnormal amount of people-skills, for him, and says, “Are you okay? You seem down.”

Bryce imagines telling Chuck the truth, even part of it— _I found out I have an identical twin brother today,_ Bryce would say, and Chuck wouldn’t believe him, would say, _That’s too sci-fi,_ thinking of clones, or maybe, _What, like Data and Lore?_ thinking of evil twins. And Bryce would say, _No, really, I’m adopted_ , and Chuck would take him seriously as he explained as much as he could, and he’d ask, _Are you going to see him?_ Or, no— _When are you going to see him?_ because Chuck and his sister love each other and Chuck won’t assume Bryce and his brother would ever be anything different. Bryce would say, _I can’t see him,_ and Chuck would say, _Why not?_ and Bryce wouldn’t be able to explain but would say, _I can’t, I just can’t, not ever—_

This is the part where it diverges from reality even further, where Imaginary-Bryce becomes the type of man who’d let himself sink into his sadness, would let himself cry, and Imaginary-Chuck would let him, and would hold him, and—

“I’m completely fine,” Bryce says. He grins, and says something about Chuck’s day, or his girl, or his classes, something to get Chuck talking and thinking about something else.

* * *

Bryce is almost grateful, later, that he’d been backed into a corner once before. Burning his brother had hurt, but it had been a practice run. He didn’t even know his brother, not really. It was just closing a door he hadn’t known existed long enough to wonder about its possibilities. Burning his friendship with Chuck—burning Chuck’s future—that’s agonizing. It’s like cutting off a limb, but worse, because it’s not just himself that he’s hurting in the process.

God, Chuck.

Yeah. That’s the worst thing he’s ever had to do.

* * *

(Bryce Larkin will have one official funeral and one unofficial one. Chuck will attend both. Bryce’s brother won’t attend either of them, because he doesn’t exist. Bryce Larkin was an only child.)

(There’ll be a day in 2009 when Neal Caffrey will wake up on the wrong side of the bed. He’ll feel sick all day. It will rain, gallons of it coming down, drop by countless drop, soaking the prison yard, and Neal won’t go out for exercise that day. He won’t protest at midnight when the prison guard says, _Lights out,_ won’t ask for one more minute. He‘ll fall asleep to the unbroken rhythm of the rain coming down and hope that in the morning when he wakes up he’ll stop feeling like somebody walked over his grave.)

( _You don’t exist before you turn eighteen,_ Peter Burke will say, and Neal Caffrey will smile and shrug and won’t say, _I had fake IDs saying I was eighteen before I ever really was,_ won’t say, _Neal Caffrey didn’t exist before, that’s why,_ and definitely won’t say anything about Danny Brooks’s disappearing act, because he’s never looked back and therefore doesn’t _know_ that if he called up the police department of the last town he lived in back then and volunteered to solve a cold case for them, they’d say there’s no missing person by the name of Danny Brooks on file.)

(Peter Burke will ask, _Did you have any family?_ and Neal will say _Peter,_ all amused, because if Peter’s resorted to asking then it means he’s really at his wits end with his chase. And Peter will say, _Parents?_ and Neal will say, _Mozzie and I have this in common,_ because Peter will know, by then, about the orphanage in Detroit. And Peter will say, _Siblings?_ and Neal will believe he’s being honest when he says, _No._ )

**Author's Note:**

> canon timeline details:  
> 1999 Bryce and Chuck meet at Stanford  
> 2002 Bryce is recruited to the CIA; Neal and Mozzie start trying to scam Adler; Peter starts his 3-year chase of Neal  
> 2003 Bryce gets Chuck expelled to protect him from the CIA  
> 2005 Neal is arrested by Peter and begins his 4-year prison sentence  
> 2007 Bryce’s fake death and funeral  
> 2009 Bryce’s real death; Neal gets his work release deal
> 
> uh I guess disclaimer I’ve never actually watched chuck? just clips of matt bomer as bryce on youtube


End file.
